Popular music for many people, scholars, musicians and fans alike is a vehicle for making everyday life manageable. It serves as an emotional tool that listeners employ to carve out meaning in a range of different context and experiences, a way of engaging with the everyday world that also allows a kind of existential flourishing (DeNora 2000; Hesmondhalgh 2013). For others, the music of everyday life is so pervasive as to hasten its banalization: hip Spotify and YouTube playlists provide the ambience for café culture and atmospheres for clothing stores, background music at supermarkets and superstores lubricates the cogs that drive consumption, and music is used to ease our wait time while on hold on the phone. The ubiquity of music in everyday life sees its power reduced to nothing more than the “phatic communication of late capitalism ” (Kassabian 2001, 10). Other considerations suggest that the waning of its communal power is now literally and figuratively recanalized through the all-pervasive earbuds, urban icons of encapsulation signalling the mobile privatization and aestheticized solipsism of the urbanite’s daily routine. Music transforms non-places —the endless commute to work, workouts, waits at the bus stop, or trips to school—into individualized, atomizing experiences (Bull 2007). As Stephen Groening notes:
Headphones allow for individual self- enclosure while not disturbing a social order dependent on crowding, face-to-face interaction, and social transactions between strangers. Headphones thus permit user fantasies of control and individuality, while the social order of late capitalism requires submission to a whole host of phenomena not directly created by (and outside of the individual agency of) each user . (Groening 2014, 5)
Music stops up the temporal and spatial voids that dot our daily routines; a siphoning off of its affective charge now rechannelled to get us through empty spaces and across dead time courtesy algorithmically curated playlists, mobile, privatized and in isolation, but still networked. This redistribution through urban spaces (and global communication networks) is a kind of flattening out of affect, with music being used as a tool to make endurable what might otherwise be viewed as wastes of space and time, non-places and non-times (Augé 1995). The tentacular encroachment into everyday life lays bare attempts to reduce music to its instrumentality and functionality as a sonic balm for daily tedium.
In contrast, and at first glance, it is at night, as a time and place seemingly distinct from the day, where popular music might be redeemed. Here, it is often understood to come back to life, in the form of an escape or respite, offering lines of flight away from the ordinary and the everyday. While no less in thrall to the logic of capital , arguably an even shadier species of false consciousness or a sonic alibi that further abets capital’s creeping colonization of the night, music does come to matter and mean differently in the darkened city. As a time given over to excesses—personal, social and semiotic—music forms the backbone of a nocturnal economy, libidinal, cultural and financial, the frisson of which is bound up in the competing drives that underpin the demands of capital as well as outstrip them. As Murray Melbin suggests:
Night’s riches is time itself. This form of natural wealth lured entrepreneurs to exploit the region for the profit opportunities it offered and much of the dark’s organized activity was evoked because of access to more time . (Melbin 1997, 14)
Night is an “additive to the engine of production”, as the city does not stop working at night, a leisure time-space that is also unmistakably a commercial one, though there is a discernible changing of the guard (ibid., 15). Labour , specifically creative labour , can take on another layer of meaning in the night-time economy , as the workaday world cedes to the crepuscular city and edges into darker night. The performers whose daytime or weekend behind-the-scenes rehearsals in lofts , living rooms and garages are now resplendent in pubs , clubs, bars and live venues, resemanticizing music as a live and lived experience. For the 9–5 workers, the privatized experience of music during the day gives way to a more public and collective moment in shared spaces, as a different musical experience starts to unfold across the night. It can act now as a vital social lubricant, the eventful soundtrack of the nocturnal city, a pointed mark of distinction between day and night, the latter offering a promise of out-of-the-ordinary experiences that makes facing work next day bearable. However, even in that eventfulness, we are left with a lingering existential question, as posed by Will Straw and Christie Pearson , of what is achieved in pitting day against night:
Should the day absorb the injuries and transgressions of the night, and make them its own? Or is the insidious work of the day, in every 24-hour cycle, to repair and contain the experiences of the night? (Straw and Pearson 2017, 6)
For many, music makers and punters alike, the reinvigoration of music at night serves as a counterpoint to the enervating music and experiences of the day. Night exists as a time-space that fosters new kinds of meaning and mattering maps, diverse and dense nocturnal cartographies born out of the crisscrossing lattices of individual dreams and collective desires. New patterns of belonging are choreographed through music’s role in galvanizing these experiences around shared activities and spaces, the night assented to as a place for boundaries to be pushed, limits broached and broken. The experiences which people hope accrue to a musicalized city after dusk are seen as important barometers of a good night out (an energizing dance floor , a sweaty live gig, a drunken late-night karaoke session, a sidewalk stumble in a midnight choir), ensuring that the city lives up to its promise to be noteworthy, affirming the mythological lure found in musical experiences at night.
Music animates the night by both mirroring and contributing to its tempo, stimulating movement within and between nightclubs , bars and music venues to give the city its nocturnal tenor and social power. Each feeds and amplifies the other’s intensity, a cordoning off social energies that affirms again night’s difference to the more sedentary trappings of the day. Music mobilizes (and, of course, also monetizes) those intensities at various sites, from bars to clubs to restaurants and cafés, sites where music serves as the organizing principle for socializing. Robert Shaw (2014) has suggested that it is better to speak of the urban night more expansively, not reducing it to simply an effect of the night-time economy , which tends to frame it as a time-space tied exclusively to the leisure and alcohol industries. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari , particularly their notion of assemblage, and the work of Bruno Latour and others around actor-network theory, Shaw claims that there are particular ways of analysing night and the city that better capture its atmospheres, textures, its felt nature and those non-economic dimensions that are not so easily accounted for in other discussions of the night-time:
What we experience as atmosphere – as the buzz, sensation and feeling of a city centre at night – cannot be described as an ‘economy.’ The night-time city is not the night-time economy ; it is a vibrating, pulsating atmosphere. It differs from day as a variety of affects and practices gain traction within a particular space-time and generate this atmosphere. (Shaw 2014, 93)
There is something to this, for, on the one hand, music registers as an ambience and atmosphere at night, palpably validating the night-time as a place of sensual and sensorial exploration, pleasure and possible abandon. On the other, while the long-standing relationship between night and popular music fosters and encourages the promises of new adventures outside the routine of the workday, it also necessitates the management and regulation of social activity, establishing a spatio-temporal zone for surveillance mechanisms to best fulfil municipal mandates designed to ensure safety and security . Night is where social regulation meets social ritual, often doing so most powerfully and paradoxically around music. As an expanse set aside from the day when identities can be more fruitfully explored, boundaries blurred, social norms questioned or even upturned, a time-space of enticement and incitement, night also exists as a place of fear and danger around darkened space and places, of certain noises/sounds that must be tamed, insulated or mitigated and, more pointedly, a zone marked by the policing, containment or neutralization of particular identities, sometimes with deadly consequences.
Popular music and the night are tightly bound up with one another in ways that make thinking of one without the other a near impossible task. The two gain their definition or, more appropriately, their cha...